GC Spotlight

Seeding the Future with Coolant

October 2025

Seeding the Future with Coolant

Creating 3D Spatial Intelligence

At General Catalyst, we believe that the future of climate resilience depends on access to better data. That’s why we’re leading the seed round for Coolant, which is building the spatial AI infrastructure to map and understand the planet in real time. 

Table of contents

Understanding the Earth’s ecosystem and landscape changes is essential for managing risk, optimizing development, and ensuring environmental health. Landowners, farmers, governments, development agencies, conservation groups, and more all rely on geospatial data, but accurately gathering this information is expensive, time-consuming, and often incomplete.

Advancements in spatial AI and 3D modeling offer a new approach to landscape intelligence. With just a few images, new 3D vision systems can now reconstruct complex terrains and ecosystems in stunning detail, without the need for costly sensors or months-long surveying work.

At General Catalyst, we believe that the future of climate resilience depends on access to better data. That’s why we’re leading the seed round for Coolant, which is building the spatial AI infrastructure to map and understand the planet in real time. 

Modeling the Earth in 3D

Using inexpensive commodity drones and proprietary 3D reconstruction models, Coolant generates centimeter-level digital twins of forests, farmland, and coastlines. They’re able to unlock new insights for risk analysis, forecasting, and land management. Ultimately, they aim to create a real-time digital model of the entire planet’s terrain, which they believe can form the intelligent backbone of optimized land management and resilience.

Coolant’s impact is already tangible, reporting 1800x faster results than the average forester. And through a partnership with The Ocean Foundation’s Blue Resilience Initiative, the company is helping restore 1,500 acres of mangroves across Puerto Rico by tracking forest growth, biodiversity recovery, and carbon sequestration rates.

Coolant’s team brings exceptional technical depth and scientific rigor. Founder and CEO Michael Wu began publishing academic research on planetary systems at 15 and co-founded Coolant after spinning out of MIT’s Climate and Energy Ventures. During meetings between his travels to be with clients onsite, we were consistently impressed with his clarity of mission, passion for solving the climate data problem, and commitment to delivering real results for his customers.

Michael, along with co-founders Belal Shaheen and Matthew Zane, has brought together a team that includes PhDs in AI from Harvard and Stanford, US Mathematical Olympiad qualifiers, and those who have held engineering roles at Five Rings, Jane Street, and Qualcomm. Together, they bridge cutting-edge AI research with real-world environmental application.

Our Conversation with Michael

We spoke with Michael to learn more about his inspiration to create Coolant. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired you to build Coolant?

Playing a role in fighting the global climate crisis has been a dream of mine since I was 14, when I spent my summers doing atmospheric chemistry research at my local university. I founded Coolant out of my dorm room at Harvard my senior year, raising my first round the last week of finals.

Fast forward three years –  I’ve now spent months living abroad in the jungles of Borneo, the swamps of Suriname, and the deserts of Senegal and Pakistan to better understand our planet and its resources. Continued inspiration is pretty easy to come by when you’re staring into some of the most beautiful ecosystems in the world. 

How do you see spatial AI transforming climate intelligence and land management?

Spatial AI is the subfield of AI that uses deep learning to better reconstruct objects and environments in 3D (how humans perceive the world) instead of in 2D (how computers have historically perceived our world). It’s the most promising new technology we’ve found for better understanding our world. 

We believe that these spatial AI models will allow us to capture significantly more data, provide more intelligence, and build better models for our planet’s ecosystems and landscapes.

What’s been most surprising in your early deployments around the world?

How big horseflies and spiders can get! In all seriousness, it’s been the collective global consciousness of the climate crisis that I’ve felt from people around the world.

SECTOR
GC INVESTMENT MILESTONES
CURRENT STATUS
LEAD INVESTORS
FOUNDERS
YEAR FOUNDED
A right-facing arrow that will bring you to the next page in the pagination